Lifelock and other similar potential wastes of money
6Do any of these services actually do anything useful (apart from over-promising)?
Their ads try to convey a “feeling of safety”. I don’t think they offer much in the way of actual safety, do they?
Most of the “we are protecting you” ambiance of the advertising seems to me to be pure BS. True, they do kinda track things. But do they - can they - fix anything? Or makes it easier for one of us to fix anything?
Is there anything genuinely valuable to these companies’s services? Should we all just lock everything down as much as we can by ourselves and be done with it?
Even if useful things (like credit freezes and trackable identity uses) and can done by one’s self for free, I would consider these services to possible be worth something if they made the actual useful action considerably easier, and the info was as timely as watching one’s accounts.
Like if they made it easier to freeze and unfreeze credit. Or easier to track potential usage of a stolen ID, or easier to report things officially.
If these services were/are efficient “one-stop-shops” for the annoying steps one can actually take that might do some good, then I might consider them.
Thoughts?
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I would be happy to share my opinion of Lifelock in particular (and this industry in general), but I prefer not to use that kind of language. There’s also the potential of lawsuits to consider.
Here are some other opinions:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2013/06/id-theft-protection-review-lifelock-consumer-reports/index.htm
https://20somethingfinance.com/lifelock-review/
(Both of these are impartial reviews, although I would trust Consumer Reports more.)
@Shrdlu
I would not have gone near Lifelock during the years they were associated with Robert Maynard (from Internet America fame). People I’ve met who tried to do business with him wound up considering him to be a pure marketing creation with little “trustworthy handshake” substance, and a man who was likely to find reasons to threaten to sue, or try to bully people into contact changes, or into forgiving contact provisions he didn’t like, and into way overstating his achievements.
(Now who does that reminds me of…?)
Maynard, I think, dissociated himself from Lifelock a decade or so ago, and Lifelock was recently sold (in toto?) to Symantec. In 2016 perhaps?
So I thought that perhaps, in all those years, and hopefully somewhat cleaned up and redeemed by the Symantec people, Lifelock had figured out a way to offer genuine value to customers in some fashion or other (apart from slick cable news marketing.)
I guess not so, huh?
Hillary?
@therealjrn
There are a number of famous creatures who might qualify for that description.
Back to the subject …
@f00l I froze my own “big 3” credit files years ago on the advice of Clark Howard (radio consumerist guy)
My Discover card recently has offered website monitoring if my details get pulled up.
And since I was a victim of the massive Equafax breach, they have some sort of monitoring I signed up for.
I don’t know if there is really anything else I can do.
@therealjrn
There is a fourth serious credit bureau called Innovis? I don’t know much about them.
There are check/banking account verifiers, and and drivers license and insurance databases, medical databases, and who knows what else.
And IRS.gov and social security databases and so forth.
And there are other bureaus worth checking.
Here is what I hope it’s a good list for most people (not super short).
https://www.consumerreports.org/equifax/a-freeze-wont-help-with-all-equifax-breach-threats/
Checking everything and instituting proper security changes would take i-have-no-idea-how-long.
That’s why I wondered if any of these iD protection services were worth a damn. I was hoping some of them made the business of locking or freezing a wide variety of accounts and services easier. Or offered something else that made them potentially valuable to a consumer.
I already have free credit monitoring thru a credit card. I wanted a unified place to check personal data security in many of these big database services, and a unified place to lock them down.
Just in case you didn’t know, there’s the granddaddy of all evil, LexisNexis (you’ll just have to trust me on this one). If you think the credit bureaus know a lot about you, you’ll realize that they’re small fry in comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexisNexis
You’re welcome. Sweet dreams tonight.
@Shrdlu .
I know a bit about them. Am related to lawyers. Who seem to know how to get all the info one could ever choke on.
I just figured that locking down one’s info on LexisNexis was hopeless.
It that true?
I’ve been using Credit Karma for a few years now and have been quite pleased with the information and services they provide. And I like that it’s free.
@heartny I’ve also been pleased with Credit Karma.
I read last week (?) that Equifax will now offer free freezing and re-opening of credit accounts forever to folks whose data was compromised by their crappy security. Adjective added by me and were not part of the original announcement.
@magic_cave
That’s a first tiny step in the general direction of ethical conduct. Ha ha.
I looked up Lifelock in the BBB website. No shock, their ratings are terrible.
Customer after customer mentions that the services are close to worthless. The monitoring of account and credit usage seems to be far less speedy and comprehensive than that provided by standard credit monitoring services.
The advertised “dark web” monitoring service seems to be pretty pointless, since if they catch something, all they could do in any case would be to notify the customer. Furthermore, they offer no sold evidence if what, if anything, at minimum, they are actually monitoring in the dark web.
In terms of notifications and fraudulent use of accounts, their notifications are often altogether missing, slow, or intermittent.
Their $1M insurance policy seems to never pay off for any purpose. Various customers who suffered actual losses are told to file a fraud warning, or go to the police, or get a lawyer, or consult with their bank or financial institution.
Person after person speaks of abysmal CS, with frequent hold times of over 1 hour, frequent transfers and additional hold times, hangups, rudeness, and CS agents who fail to understand the reason for the call. And frequent asked varying contradictions of company policy.
Attempts to cancel service seen to involve multiple transfers and attempted upsells.
I am unable to find an instance where the company actually ever provided what most of us might wish to see as timely, efficient, worthwhile, useful services.
My first impression is that they offer poor quality credit monitoring, at best.
The rest of their operations seem to consist of banks of CS persons explaining why a particular service that would appear to be what they advertise isn’t actually offered; or isn’t reliable; or can’t be used in the only way someone might ever need to use it.
They seem to be pure auto-billed fluffy, vague promises, offering gauzy images of imaginary “safety” interspersed with threats of our personal information being traded illicitly beyond our knowledge. All hyped with Madison Ave’s finest imagery.
I can’t even say that they make it in some sense easier to deal with problems that might arise. It seems to be pure marketing, backed by “nothing.”
https://www.bbb.org/phoenix/business-reviews/identity-theft-protection/lifelock-inc-in-tempe-az-83005924/reviews-and-complaints
I kinda wish someone had tried to create a legit business service operating in the area of personal identity theft; but am not terribly surprised to find the industry dominated by a company that sells “nothing” for a nice price.
I guess I hoped that the Symantec acquisition meant that Lifelock would finally develop a value beyond monthly auto-billing for “nothing”.
I suppose that the continuing and very recent 1-star rating trends tells me as much about Symantec as of Lifelock.
For the catalog of customer complaints, I gather that Lifelock’s new signups are booming in the wake if recent hacks.